US customers can no longer participate in bitcoin futures trading at the OKCoin exchange.

Like many other countries, the USA is developing legislative regulations to get the bitcoin market under control, writes J.P. Buntinx for themerkle.com. Any unexpected restriction put by the government can strongly influence all participants, including exchange operators. And this risk is too great. This is the reason why OKCoin doesn’t allow US traders to buy and sell futures contracts any longer, Buntinx says.

While OKCoin took certain steps earlier to prevent US citizens from futures trading, some ways still remained to circumvent these regulations. According toreddit.com, there were two options: “A) Not generate a new deposit address. B) Download the mobile app and send coins to that address, which you could then use on the futures markets”. But now OKCoin has finally blocked any possibility of such deals.

US traders will have to look for alternative platforms, although the choice is not very vast. 1Broker is one of such platforms, but their futures trading service is still “in an experimental state”, writes Buntinx.

The decision made by OKCoin will not affect the price of the cryptocurrency now, claims Buntinx. The major part of the global bitcoin market is still located in China, so the absence of US futures traders will hardly influence the general situation in the short run. But in the long-term perspective, if US customers can’t influence the price of bitcoin at all, this can lead to a new paradigm, Buntinx says.

Earlier this year OKCoin put restrictions on US citizens, forbidding them to deposit money into their bitcoin accounts. The reason was also connected with US government’s regulations.

Andrew Levich